E545 | You Have To Give Things Up To Grow

In order to take your career to the next level, at some point you will need to give up some things you never thought you would. You need to decide what your mission is and the impact that you want to have on others if that is the goal. Maybe it's not the right time in your entrepreneurial journey to hear this, but I still think you can take something valuable away from this episode. Enjoy!

• Are you personally satisfied with your career
• Humans are messy
• What do you want your life to look like

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: So one of the best ways to improve your customer experience, which we know will dramatically improve your business, is to have clear lines of communication with your clients. And that's something that can be really hard with these multiple channels between email and text. And what you really need is to centralize that in one place.

And that's something that we've been able to do as we switched over to PT everywhere within our client's accounts. We can actually message right back and forth with them. They can manage their home exercise plan within there, and it allows us to really compartmentalize the communication. That we have with those clients, instead of losing an email in the inbox or missing a text and then you're, it's very hard to dig yourself outta that hole because they feel like you're not very responsive, with them.

And for us, it's made a really big difference. It helps make our staff more efficient. It helps us not miss things as much with the volume of people that we're working with. And it's a really smart way of really compartmentalizing your communication with your clients so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the channels.

You have communication with family and friends and things like that, so I think it'd be huge for your practice to centralize it the way we have. Head over to pt everywhere.com. Check out what our friends are doing over there. I think it's really cool and I think you really like it. So here's the question.

How do physical therapists like us who don't wanna see 30 patients a day, who don't wanna work home health and have real student loans create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about? This is the question, and this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Mate, and welcome to the PT Entrepreneur Podcast.

What's going on, guys? Dr. Danny here, the PT Entrepreneur podcast, and today we're talking about. Making difficult decisions about giving things up, about moving towards things that you need to do in order to achieve the goals that you have. And this is something that came from a conversation I had recently at at dinner with I was.

It's with my wife and a couple that lives down the road from us. Our kids go to school together and we went out to dinner and they went to a concert. Nathaniel Radcliffe, by the way, shout out. That was awesome. That guy is super talented. If you good chance to see him go check him out. But we're sitting at dinner and this couple that is friends of ours.

They are both practicing physicians. One is a pediatrician, the other one is a pediatric oncologist that primarily focuses on bone marrow transplants. So two smart people, we'll put it that way. And while we were having dinner the husband, he asked me cuz he's actually seen me in our practice before.

And he asked me, he goes, do you miss. Seeing patients, do you miss clinical work? And, I almost like reflexively blur, blurted out. I absolutely do. That's what I said to him. And it caught me off guard a little bit. Cause I didn't really say anything after that.

I just stopped and it was awkward. And he goes why don't you just, why don't you just go back to seeing, to treating patients? And I basically told 'em, I go, dude it's complex. I can't I just don't, I don't have. There's layers there that, I don't have the, I don't a, have the time to do it, and b, I need to, I would need to spend a lot of time focusing on clinical education again, in order to get myself back to a place where I would feel like I was like really in a place to help people the way that I used to be.

And I thought a lot about this sort of concept of giving things up. Things that maybe we really even like to do. And I thought of a few instances in which I've had to do this. And ultimately for me, it's come back to what is going to move me towards the goals that I have, the impact goals in particular that I have.

And for me, my goal at this point is really all about seeing. Other people be able to function in a manner that, that I was able to within, within my practice, within the practice that Ashley and I started and getting to the point where clinicians can get back to enjoying being a clinician again and not.

Hating what they do and regretting taking on all the debt that they have taken on and starting to resent the career profession that they have chosen that it almost feels like they were lied to. Cuz when they get into these high volume cleanings, these traditional settings, it's just not, it's not what you think it's gonna be.

It's not what I thought it was gonna be. And. That is the emphasis for what I make my decisions on at this point. How do we get more clinicians to be able to enjoy what they do to learn about the model that, that that we function within, that we help people run. And it doesn't even have anything to do with the business side.

Like I it does in some ways because you need money to provide for your family, to provide for your livelihood. But that's a byproduct of providing a lot of value to other people. It's not the main driver, right? This isn't a cash grant. I know a lot of entrepreneurs that have businesses that just make a lot of money, and there's no personal satisfaction associated with it.

I know people that have I ice vending machines. They don't give, they don't care about ice. They care about money. They wanna make money, and I don't really, there's nothing wrong with that necessarily. It's just not the type of business that I want to be involved in. I want to have personal satisfaction.

I wanna be tied personally in a way to where I'm seeing people make progress. I'm, I have that now with businesses. And for you as a clinician, you can have that with your patients and you have that and when you have your own clinic, you get to set it up in a manner where it's just such a more healthy relationship between compliance with a patient and you getting paid what you're worth and being able to see less people and not to deal so much with the red tape of insurance.

That's why we're such a big fan of it. And right now it's the best approach to the practice or to, to the profession that we know of. If that evolves and that changes, like we'll evolve to that, whatever the best option is. And as I was having this conversation and I was thinking about this and what our friend asked me, I started thinking about the clinic and.

That environment. And there's plenty of things that you can, that frustrate you about any career field. There's no doubt about that. And there's plenty of things in the clinic that, you could do without, but by and large that environment a clinical environment where you have very bought in patients, you're working with a niche group of people that you enjoy working with and you don't have a massive amount of volume that's burning you out.

It's actually. One of the more fun environments that I've ever functioned in. It's great, and it's something that I hope most people in our profession would get a chance to experience that if they feel unsatisfied with the current state that they're at. But you can't get there. You can't make an a, a change without some amount of discomfort and giving other things up.

And for you that might be the safety of a paycheck. That might be, giving up the safe environment that you've found yourself in, that now you've somewhat become complacent within the security of that, of knowing where you're going, of knowing what's gonna happen next. There's some amount of comfort there that is something that people have to give up, they have to move past in order to be able to have impact in a, in another way, or to change what they're doing, and for me, On multiple occasions, as I thought about this, I'm like, man, what are the things that I had to give up that have led to where we're at now?

And the first one was leaving the military. I very much enjoyed being in the military. I enjoyed the setting, I enjoyed the people. I got to a point where I started to not like my job, where I was basically found myself in like a. Outpatient orthopedic hospital clinic, basically treating fairly high volume and not the population that, that I necessarily wanted to be around.

But when I was in more of a smaller infantry brigade unit kind of job that I had, I loved it when I was at a smaller clinic that was attached to, more of the operational units of the military. I loved it. I loved the camaraderie and. I gave it up and the reason I gave it up was because I thought I had a better opportunity to per pursue a business that would allow me to align with what I wanted, w in the clinical sense with a better opportunity to provide for my family and to make an impact in a different way.

Gave up one thing to move on to the next. As that clinic started to grow, I started to have to take myself out of. The environment that I really liked the most, which was treating people, and I was very slow to do it. And there's still many people that we work with that are very slow to do it.

And it's because I liked it. I didn't like it. I loved it. I was a clinic nerd. I loved this shit. I went to more con ed courses than I can remember, and it wasn't about what's the minimum number of connet hours I needed? It was like, what's the course that I need to learn to be better at what I'm doing?

Like many of you, and as I'm growing a business, I had to take myself out of that environment because if I'm just seeing all the patients, I don't have time to mentor other clinicians. I don't have time to get involved in the business side and actually grow and scale that and try to improve, and then eventually start to move to where you do less and less of that and more of the higher impact activities.

I started a podcast with a good friend of mine called the Doc and Jock podcast. Years ago, the first podcast that ever started, one of my best friends, and as I, as that podcast grew, we realized, there was a interest. In the business side of things, when I would start to answer questions about our business, when I would start to bring up things about the business, we would see the data, the analytics of interest would change somewhat.

People were very interested in that. And as I started to notice that I had to make the difficult decision to drop that podcast, which was doing well with someone that I really enjoyed, doing a podcast with and having time with, and. It was very hard to tell one of your best friends that you can't continue this project because you feel compelled to really help another group of people.

And the bandwidth is just not there. You don't have, an unlimited amount of time. And to drop that to then move onto the PT Entrepreneur podcast, which you're listening to right now, that was because of having to make a difficult decision to drop this other. In many ways successful project that I just felt didn't align with the people that I wanted to help the most.

And then ultimately completely being removed from seeing patients and going from at least hanging on to one day a week in the clinic to completely cutting that out so that I could focus on things like this. More on building our team, on working with the businesses that we work with and growing and having a bigger impact there.

That's a difficult thing to do. That's something that I really enjoyed, and to be honest, that's a setting that I really enjoyed. It's a group of people I enjoyed being around our employees. Our culture is great. The location and just being around those folks was awesome. The patients that we get to work with, it's great.

And cutting some of these things out to then focus on the things that are gonna leverage, you're gonna be able to leverage towards the goals that you have. These are common. And even now today with PT Biz, less and less coaching directly and more working with our team, again, refine ourself in the same.

Exact place, right? You go from staff clinician to then mentoring other clinicians. You started practice and then you go to running the practice and mentoring those clinicians. You I started PT Biz and I went from working with every single person one-on-one to then as we started work with more people and we started to have a bigger impact, being able to work with coaches and the people on our team to then take the frameworks that we're learning to then ex, extend those out to more people so that we can help more people.

Because it just depends what your goals are, right? If your goals are, man, I want to be a clinic ninja. I just wanna see people that I wanna work with. I wanna make sure that they're highly bought in. I wanna be able to use my skillset, and I wanna get better Every single year you can do that. You can do that in a number of settings.

You can do that even in your own practice and never have to hire anybody else. You can be happiest. Hell, you do that if that's what you want. And if you start to realize, man, I feel like I need more. I need more of a challenge. I need to help more people. I have a wait list of folks. What do you do?

Wow. You have to hire. You have to hire. And when you do that, now you have a whole nother set of skills you have to learn, that you have to acquire, and you have to improve, and you have to then become a better leader. A better mentor, not just clinically, but also just as a human. Mentoring other humans.

They're messy, they're multifactorial. They've got shit going on in their life that has nothing to do with your business. And that takes time. And that means you have to say no to other things, even though you might like them a lot. And this continuum goes on and on. And I think if you look at any other areas of your life, you'll see it saying no to going out to the bar cuz you gotta study for a test.

So you can get into the school is giving something up, saying no to being on, this. Softball team because you have to do workshops in the evening so you can grow. Your practice is giving something up, and we're going to have to do that over and over again. And here's the thing that I've found that's the most important, is you've got to know where you're trying to go.

You've got to know what the direction is that you're heading because it's so easy to second guess yourself. I've done this a lot. It's did I do the right thing or did I screw this up? Did I do the right thing by, taking this turn versus this turn or shit? Am I lost now? And if you don't know where you're going, if you don't know what you want your life to look like, if you don't know what kind of impact you want to have, and you have to start there, how do you know if you're making the right move?

How do you know if you're taking the right direction or if you're going the wrong way? So you gotta know where you're trying to go. And that starts with what do you want your life to look like? Who do you want to help and what kind of impact do you want to have? And as you get very clear on those, the decisions that you're gonna have to make, and you're gonna have to say yes or no to, it's gonna start to become much more clear of what you should do, or where you should go.

It's like the Dr. Seuss book, right? All the places you'll go probably. It's probably my favorite book with kids, not as an adult, but for me to read to my kids. I've read that book to my kids. I don't know how many times many times. They're sick of it. Lemme put it that way. They could probably recite that book.

I love that book. And the reason I like that book is because it's so true. Read it. If you haven't read that book in a long time, read that book and just realize just, damn, he's so spot on of all the things that'll happen. And sometimes you go the wrong direction and sometimes you go the right direction.

But ultimately we're gonna get where we were gonna go, especially the right place if we know what we're trying to ultimately accomplish. I think for a lot of people, that's the hard part, right? That's always been tough for me. Super hard. And not knowing if you're making the right decision, I think is very natural too.

Even if you're very clear, I want to go here, I gotta do this. It's human nature for us to second guess if we did the right thing or the wrong thing. Especially if it involves things that we really enjoy or people that we really value, but you can't have everything. I had a mentor tell me one time, he said, you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything.

You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything. Now think about this. Let's say you're a celebrity. You got all the money and fame and all the shit that comes along with that, you can't have seclusion. You can't be normal. You can't just go to a store and it be normal. You can't go to an amusement park with your kids and it just be normal.

You can't, your life is different. What you wanted was this, but you can't have this. You can't have anything. You can have everything. You can't you can't. You can have anything, but you can't have everything. And as we start to make decisions, you gotta understand what you want and that you're gonna have to say no to some things.

You actually say no to a lot of things, to ultimately be able to say yes to the right things. They're gonna let you scale. They're gonna let you compound that, grow that, and impact the people that you want to impact. Have the life that you want. Have the family that you want, have the values surrounded around that family that you want to have intentionally.

And a lot of that comes from whittling things down and cutting things out, even if they're a big part of your life. So for me, this is something that I just, in a lot of ways, I felt compelled to share. I see this in the entrepreneurial journey a lot. I see this really in just in life. I see this with so many things now.

That, I can take this lens to in life and in my kids' lives, and my friends' lives, my family, just anything. Let's think about this. Like you're gonna have to make difficult decisions. You're going to have to cut things out, but ultimately you have to know if you're cutting the right things out or the wrong things out.

And the only way you're gonna know that. Is if you know where you're trying to go, and if you don't know that, I highly recommend you spend some time reflecting on that. Just thinking about that, what do I want my life to look like? What's important to me? What's important for me to be able to experience while I'm here with, who do I wanna experience with?

What impact do I wanna have? What do I get in, what do I get joy from? What is it that I get energy from I get excited about doing? And as you can do more and more of those things, I think you're gonna realize that you're making right more of the right decisions, even as you start to drop things that maybe are important to you.

So guys, I hope this helps. I hope this is something that hits home for some of you and some of you might be like, What is this guy talking about? And that's cool too, cause maybe it's not the right time for you to even hear this but maybe you can come back and listen to this in a year and then it will be.

But either way I appreciate so much that you listen to this podcast. You have no idea. It's crazy to me that someone even gives gives any thought to what I have to say. But I'll keep putting these out as long as you keep listening. So as always, guys, thanks so much for listening.

I'll catch you next week.

What's up, PT Entrepreneurs? We have a new exciting challenge for you guys. It's our five day PT biz part-time to full-time challenge where we help you get crystal clear on how to actually go from a side hustle to a full-time clinic. Even if you haven't started yet. This is a great way to get yourself organized in preparation for eventually going full-time into your business.

So we actually help you get crystal clear on how much money you're actually gonna need to. Replace with your business to be able to make a lateral transfer. How many people you're actually gonna need to see based on what you should be charging. We're gonna tell you three different strategies you can take to go from part-time to full-time, and you get to pick the one that seems like the best fit for you for your current situation.

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That's what this is all about. We want you to win. We want you to take action, and in order to do you have to get really clear on what you need to do next. So go to physical therapy biz.com/challenge. Get signed up for the challenge today. It's totally free. We think this is gonna be a game changer for you and are excited to go through it.

Hey, real quick before you go, I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I would love it if you got involved in the conversation. So this is a one way channel. I'd love to hear back from you. I'd love to get you into the group that we have formed on Facebook. Our PT Entrepreneurs Facebook group has about.

4,000 clinicians in there that are literally changing the face of our profession. I'd love for you to join the conversation, get connected with other clinicians all over the country.

I do live trainings in there with Yves Gege every single week, and we share resources that we don't share anywhere else outside of that group.So if you're serious about being a PT entrepreneur, a clinical rainmaker, head to that group. Get signed up. Go to facebook.com/groups/ptentrepreneur, or go to Facebook and just search for PT Entrepreneur. And we're gonna be the only group that pops up under that.